Recently, I started working with one of the best Titanium Titans on one of my mobile projects. For those people who aren't familiar with the concept, Titans in the world of Appcelerator's Titanium are the thought leaders of the project and, obviously, wicked smart developers. In one of our conversations, he mentioned that a lot of his clients need Drupal expertise and want to use Titanium with Drupal 7, and he asked me about a good introductory book for himself.

My first suggestion was Pro Drupal 7 Development, but after reconsideration, I wasn't sure if that was the best book to get him familiar with the rich feature set of Drupal. Although it explains the building blocks of Drupal itself very well, it doesn't provide guidance on the tools, tips & tricks and, most importantly, most used Drupal 7 modules.

For a developer with a pre-existing intermediate to high level of programming expertise who wants to start getting a solid feeling for Drupal 7, I'd recommend Drupal 7 Development by Example instead. I particularly found the discussion of both Drupal basics and 'must-have' modules interesting, which of course features the creation of custom content types and a quick introduction to module development, as well as usage examples for modules such as the Media module, Colorbox, Webform, Views, Views Slideshow. Since the book covers a lot of ground, you shouldn't expect the author to go into too much depth in each area, but anyone looking for a great introduction to the power of Drupal and it's powerful world of modules, this book is an excellent choice.

If you've ever read all the way through a Drupal book, you will have found those short chapters at the end that mention some of Drupal's more advanced features such as multi-lingual sites. Whenever you setup a Drupal installation that requires the word "multi", you'd wish that those 2 short pages would be filling a whole book. That's exactly what Packt Publishing has done with a cool new series called "Drupal Mini Series": A compact, roughly 100 page long book about a single topic that explains all aspects of it in the level of detail you were looking for.

The first one I read was Drupal 7 Multi-sites Configuration, which explains (in the right level of detail) how to run multiple websites from a single Drupal 7 instance, including the often missing information on server setup, virtual host configuration and how to update a multi-site.

I've been a big fan of Packt's Drupal books for a while; and especially of Matt Butcher. There aren't that many tech writers out there who can actually explain complicated systems in an easy way. Get your copy here, there are currently two more titles available (Drush User’s Guide and Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites), with hopefully more to come soon.

One of my clients' website viewers are moving from desktop to mobile devices. And of course, he is showcasing a lot of music on his website, currently being displayed using a Flash frontend player, which can't be viewed on iOS devices. To fix that, I recommended switching to jPlayer, a HTML5-based player that uses Flash as a fallback for browsers that don't support it yet. This post is intended to provide the missing pieces of information for those of us still, ahem, stuck with a Drupal 6 installation (the jPlayer documentation primarily focuses on Drupal 7).

Installation

Install Jplayer module for Drupal 6 and enable it like any usual module

Download the jPlayer plugin version 1.2.0 from here or directly here. The most current version (jPlayer 2.0.0) is not compatible with the Drupal 6 jPlayer module. Extract the contents in 'sites/all/libraries/jplayer'

Go to the configuration page of the jPlayer Drupal module (admin/config/media/jplayer) and specify the path for the jPlayer library as configured above ('sites/all/libraries/jplayer')

This should be all that's involved. You should be good to go to use jPlayer in your content types (select it under "Display Fields" for your content types that have MP3 files uploaded) or use it in Views.

Theming

Of course, it would be great if we could use jPlayer for just any node that has an MP3 file attached to it, either in our theme files or anywhere else we want to manually display an MP3 file using jPlayer. I wasn't able to find the theming documentation for it on the module page, so here's a quick code snippet to get you going. For this example, I'm assuming that you have a content type called 'song' setup, every song node has 1 MP3 file associated with it.

$nid=100;// Example node id 100$node= node_load($nid);// Loading the full song node$type_name='song';// Machine-name of the node content type$field_name='field_song_file';// Machine-name of the CCK field you use to store the MP3 file$jplayer_data=array('#field_name'=>$field_name,'#node'=>$node,'#type_name'=>$type_name,'#theme'=>'jplayer_formatter_single','#item'=>$node->{$field_name}[0],);print theme('jplayer_formatter_single',$jplayer_data);

I recently published a module on drupal.org that allows site admins to send push notifications to users that have registered their mobile device tokens and got asked how users can register a device token. The Push Notifications module for Drupal 7 can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/push_notifications. Here's a quick tutorial on how to register a token through the services interface.

Just like everyone else these days, I am jumping on the Drupal 7 bandwagon for my newer projects. And every time, I come across the question which theme to use. By default, I gravitate towards Zen. I know it inside out, it is still the most-used theme across all Drupal sites and it just seems like the right way to go. I'm not a big fan of splitting up my css into tens of stylesheets, but I can go with the flow.

Then there is Fusion, which is "a simplified 960px" grid theme and #2 on Drupal.org. As a developer, I often come across these red flags that should be slightly orange ones at best, but I just can't stop including them into my decision making process. With Fusion, that would be the fact that it is a theme by "Top Notch Themes". Nothing wrong with that company, but it's just that: there's a company behind it that sells most of their other themes. Other than that, it seems to be a perfectly fine theme.

And then there is the new kid on the block: Omega. With a cool name like that, how could you say no (even cooler: the core and starterkit themes are called Alpha and Omega => geek points for that!). Something that I need for my projects is to have most of the configuration to live in the code, not the database, for a lot of reasons other than "versionability". And from some developer friends, I've heard that Omega's configuration lives mostly in the database. That being said: the usage statistics for Drupal 7 are crazy good: http://drupal.org/project/usage/omega.

The theme package with the fanciest HTML 5 logo is AdaptiveTheme and its numerous sub-themes and sub-themes thereof.

Enough said, let's get to the trial & switch-to-another-theme part :)

Just like everyone else these days, I am jumping on the Drupal 7 bandwagon for my newer projects. And every time, I come across the question which theme to use. By default, I gravitate towards Zen (http://drupal.org/project/zen). I know it inside out, it is still the most-used theme across all Drupal sites and it just seems like the right way to go. I'm not a big fan of splitting up my css into tens of stylesheets, but I can go with the flow.

Then there is Fusion (http://drupal.org/project/fusion), which is "a simplified 960px" grid theme and #2 on Drupal.org. As a developer, I often come across these red flags that should be slightly orange ones at best, but I just can't stop including them into my decision making process. With Fusion, that would be the fact that it is a theme by "Top Notch Themes". Nothing wrong with that company, but it's just that: there's a company behind it that sells most of their other themes. Other than that, it seems to be a perfectly fine theme.

And then there is the new kid on the block: Omega (http://drupal.org/project/omega). With a cool name like that, how could you say no (even cooler: the core and starterkit themes are called Alpha and Omega => geek points for that!). Something that I need for my projects is to have most of the configuration to live in the code, not the database, for a lot of reasons other than "versionability". And from some developer friends, I've heard that Omega's configuration lives mostly in the database. That being said: the usage statistics for Drupal 7 are crazy good: http://drupal.org/project/usage/omega.

One of my favorite modules for Drupal is the Privatemsg module. It's basically the Drupal version of Gmail, including a huge feature set for (almost) any need. For one of my clients, I needed to create a feature set that allows him to send internal notifications. Although the newest version of the Privatemsg module comes with the feature to send messages to specific user groups (in Drupal talk: roles), that feature didn't quite fit the required needs, so I decided to write a contrib module with a larger feature-set: Privatemsg Bulkmail.

The Privatemsg Bulkmail module is intended for site administrators who want to send out an identical private message to a large user base (100.000 users and more). An example use case would be an internal notification to all registered users through a private message.

Here's the description of the feature set:

Send out private messages from a specific user (instead of the current user)